Tentative Publication date: Early January 2024

Carol Robinson was a savvy first-hand witness of the collapse of large swaths of Catholic culture in America in the immediate post-Vatican II years. In these detailed and perceptive essays from the pages of The Wanderer, she passionately yet soundly dissects the destructive forces at work in the years spanning 1971–1987. Robinsons’ keen analytical mind surveys many of the most pressing issues of the time, but three themes are uppermost in her mind, beginning with a concerning reluctance from Bishops to exercise their apostolic duty to teach the faithful. Robinson chronicles the epidemic of increasingly poor catechizing that resulted in a generation of young Catholics who were ever more ignorant of the Magisterium. Robinson is exceptionally good at chronicling the dereliction of the teaching office in regard to Scripture, examining how the misuse of historical-critical methodologies at the hands of Catholic biblical scholars progressively undermined belief in the word of God among post-Conciliar Catholics. Above all, Robinson devotes her energies to exposing distressing trends within Thomism in the wake of the Council, a time when the Angelic Doctor’s work lost its preeminence in the schools, especially when it came to seminary formation. Robinson is particularly insightful in her critique of a growing historicization of Aquinas’ thought amidst the Thomist movement itself, which in her mind parallels the analogous process of demythologizing of Scripture. After surveying a host of innovating academics who would reduce Thomas’ thought to the historically conditioned product of a bygone era, Robinson persuasively argues for the enduring universality of the Common Doctor, and the undiminished relevance of his teaching as anchored in a firm, clear-sited philosophy of being. The pieces reprinted here provide a fascinating window into the tumultuous situation in the Church in these years, but this collection is much more than a mere review of the troubled past. In her diagnosis of the problems besetting the Catholicism of her time she also provides a prophetic strategy for the embattled Church in our own day, centered around a profound retrieval of authentic Thomism and the perennial spiritual and intellectual patrimony of Catholic Tradition.

Size: 6 x 9